Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Road Rage Review (PS4)

Confession time. When an email (with a surprisingly decent
looking launch trailer) about Road Rage showed up in my inbox I thought it was
some lovingly crafted indie Kickstarted homage to Road Rash or something
similar so I requested a copy. If I had known it was an ugly, buggy, laggy,
terrible playing mess – that happened to feature vaguely familiar motorcycle
melee combat – I wouldn’t have bothered. Road Rage is just plain awful.
Continue reading our full PS4 Road Rage review for all of the details.

Game Details

Publisher: Maximum Games

Developer: Team 6

ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature

Genre: Racing

Pros: Customization

Cons: Awful gameplay; laggy menus; ugly graphics; bad sound;
glitches

MSRP: $30

A dystopian future city where giant walls separate the
social classes and motorcycle gangs roam the streets is your playground in Road
Rage. By winning races and doing, uh, stuff, your gang will somehow clean up
the cesspool of a city and bring justice back to the masses. I guess? It
doesn’t matter.

The story doesn’t matter because pretty much everything
about the game is awful. Gameplay-wise it starts off fairly straightforward.
Right trigger accelerates, left trigger brakes, and left analog stick turns.
Strangely, the controls are incredibly twitchy and oversensitive except when
you actually need to go around a corner, at which point the bikes understeer
like crazy. Using melee attacks against other riders is a crapshoot as there is
1. a delay when you press the buttons, 2. your attacks miss more often than not
regardless of your positioning, and 3. the attacks aren’t satisfying feeling in
the least. The whole point of the game is the brutal melee combat while tearing
around on a motorcycle and they totally blew it.

What makes the thoroughly mediocre gameplay even worse is
that the A.I. is terrible and the game is full of glitches. The A.I. doesn’t
seem finished, honestly. They never pose much of a threat to actually beat you
in a race and routinely get stuck on objects or can’t make turns so you easily
drive away and win. Of course, the game is also full of glitches, too, so even
if the A.I. can’t beat you in a fair fight you’ll still lose surprisingly often
because the game just freaks out. We fell through the world, we got bumped by
invisible objects that made us take the wrong path and instantly lose, the game
respawned us after crashes behind fences or other impassable objects, we
crashed for no reason, we exploded for no reason, we got stuck on level
geometry … the list goes on and on. And if you can avoid glitches and fight the
clunky gameplay to keep your bike on the road, the game is then way way too
easy and boring. Road Rage is just terrible.

The one positive about Road Rage is that it has a fairly
decent amount of content. The open world map is large and there are lots of
events and do. There is also fairly extensive customization with a ton of
different bikes to choose from, all of which can be upgraded and customized,
and a bunch of different weapons. Of course, you have to fight laggy slow menus
to actually do anything, but it’s commendable that there’s so much content
here. Too bad the gameplay is so poor no one will want to see most of it.

Visually, Road Rage is lackluster at best and ugly at worst.
Bland environmental textures and bad character models with incredibly stiff and
stilted animation are about all Road Rage has to offer. The game also utilizes
level obscuring fog to an extent we haven’t seen since the PS2 days to cover up
what, we can only assume, must be ridiculous pop-in. Add in monotone engine
noises and the worst collection of license-free buttrock music you can find and
Road Rage’s mediocre presentation is complete.

Road Rage is a total mess from top to bottom. With bad
presentation, terrible controls, bad A.I., and overwhelmingly glitchy gameplay,
it is one of the worst games of 2017. Road Rage isn’t worth $3, and definitely
not it’s $30 MSRP. Skip it. Forget it exists.